The Royal Women of Buganda

Abstract

Women were looked down upon and in many respects were completely segregated. They were not permitted to touch things that the men were doing.1 Thus Sir Apolo Kaggwa (chief minister or katikkiro of Buganda from 1890 to 1926) described the position of women in the authoritarian, strongly hierarchical, and most definitely patriarchal Buganda kingdom. Yet, of the three people who could be addressed as kabaka, or king, two were women, the queen mother and the queen sister (a half-sister of the king who acted in the role of queen at his installation).2 In addition, the senior wives of the kabaka and the princesses (those women who were descended from a king) also merited special respect and had and privilege within Ganda society. The questions that arise here is why these women had such special in an avowedly patriarchal society, what their actual role in society was, and what the relationship was between their role and that of non-royal females. In the past twenty years much has been written on the theory and of women in different societies.3 Many of these studies, however, concentrate too much on trying to discover a few key factors that determine a status level for women in general. The result is simplistic explanations that fail to account for a variety of statuses that may exist for women within a specific society. These statuses may or may not be interdependent, and a favorable position for women in one area does not necessarily translate to high in other areas.4 In Ganda society, for example, a woman was generally considered a minor in the sense that she did not inherit property from her husband and had to have a male guardian who had authority over her and was responsible to the legal system for her acts.5 Yet the queen mother and queen sister had their own courts and had the power to collect taxes and condemn their own people to death. It would be a mistake, however, to simply dismiss these personages as exceptions to general low female